While Israel markets itself as the most gay-friendly country in the world, its PR hacks are busy reviving homophobic rumors that Arafat was a gay “sexual deviant” who died of AIDS due to his promiscuity.

On Tuesday, Aljazeera broke a bombshell story that the clothes Arafat wore as he died of a sudden and mysterious illness in 2004, contained strong traces of the lethal radioactive element polonium, raising the possibility that he may have been poisoned.

Arafat fell ill on 12 October 2004 at his Ramallah headquarters where he was besieged by Israeli forces and died in a French military hospital in Paris on 11 November 2004.

Following Aljazeera’s revelations, Arafat’s widow, Suha Arafat, has called for her late husband’s body to be exhumed so that further tests could be carried out.

Genealogy of a lie: Arafat “died of AIDS”

Following the Aljazeera report, Lenny Ben-David, former Deputy Chief of Mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and current public relations consultant to the Israeli government, posted a lurid article at The Times of Israel reviving rumors that Arafat died of AIDS and blaming his “sexual proclivities”:

Yasser Arafat was a murderous, genocidal, diabolical, duplicitous sexual deviant who died at the age of 75. He was despised by Arab and Israeli alike.

Ben-David dismisses the possibility that Arafat was poisoned and asserts:

Less romantic and mythical, however, is the more likely cause of Arafat’s death – AIDS.

Arafat’s sexual proclivities have been an open secret for years. The former head of Rumanian intelligence, Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, disclosed in his book “Red Horizons,” that one of his officers reported, “the ‘Fedayee’ [Arafat’s code name] is in his bedroom making love to his bodyguard. The one I knew was his latest lover. He’s playing tiger again. The officer monitoring his microphones connected me live with the bedroom, and the squawling almost broke my eardrums. Arafat was roaring like a tiger, and his lover yelping like a hyena.”

In addition to this “evidence,” Ben-David cites another piece of “proof” that has circulated widely on Zionist websites:

After Arafat’s death, his personal physician admitted in a TV interview that his patient died of AIDS.

Both of these pieces of “evidence” are junk.

Notably, Ben-David’s article has been tweeted and amplified by influential former AIPAC operative Josh Block.

Josh Block@JoshBlockDC Old story of Arafa being poisoned is back again, but more likely the vile terrorist died of AIDS blogs.timesofisrael.com/for-the-palest…

Fabrications as source of Arafat rumor

The account from Ion Pacepa a former Romanian intelligence official – which appears to be the original source of the rumors about Arafat’s sexuality – was described by Scott Long recently as a collection of “fabrications”:

Putative insults directed at the sexualities of US enemies in the region are legion. There was, and is, for instance, a longstanding rumor that Yasser Arafat was gay and died of AIDS, spread by neoconservatives with glee. Unlike most rumors, it’s possible to pinpoint this one’s source with some precision. Ion Pacepa, chief of foreign intelligence in Ceausescu’s Romania, defected to the US in 1978, and later composed his memoir, Red Horizons, while under CIA protection. In it, he claimed that secret microphones caught Arafat making love to his male bodyguard while visiting Bucharest.The book is full of wild stories, and this particular propaganda gem had a two-birds usefulness for the US: it impugned not only Arafat for screwing a man, but Ceausescu (notoriously puritanical) for tolerating it. The CIA called his book ”an important and unique contribution to the United States,” and it should be read as such, along with other important and unique fabrications such as the histories of Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch.

Ashraf al-Kurdi interview: dubious and distorted

Ben-David, and numerous other Zionist publications, have circulated this video of Ashraf al-Kurdi, purporting to state in Arabic that Arafat had died of AIDS.

Not only is the clip mistranslated and apparently misleadingly edited, but Kurdi is actually on record saying the opposite.

This is what the subtitles claim Kurdi said:

I asked to talk with one of the French doctors, I wanted to hear from them about his condition, but they didn’t answer me.

When the president Yasser Arafat died, they sent me an e-mail, or a notification which according to it the president Arafat is hospitalized at their place and that from the blood tests it turns out that he suffers from Aids virus.

The video then cuts to an Israeli TV studio, where a commentator identified as Zvi Yehezkeli asserts that Kurdi had “admitted” that Arafat died of AIDS.

This is what Kurdi actually says:

The French doctors.. despite the fact that I spoke, that I asked to see any of them, or to hear from any of them, did not answer me. When President Yasser Arafat died, they sent me an email or an electronic letter, that Arafat had entered their hospital and after a blood test they found that he has the AIDS microbe.

The (mis)translation appears to suggest that Kurdi said Arafat “suffered from the Aids virus” – not so subtely suggesting he had the illness called AIDS. Kurdi never used the word “suffered” – he claimed only that Arafat “has the AIDS microbe” or virus based on a blood test. As everyone knows, having the HIV virus that causes AIDS, is not the same thing as “suffering from” AIDS.

But there’s more. The video clip cuts Kurdi off in mid-sentence. We were unable to find a longer clip, however a 2005 Los Angeles Times article about an investigation into the causes of Arafat’s death carried out jointly by The New York Times and Haaretz based on Arafat’s medical records they said they had obtained states the following:

The Haaretz report, based on excerpts from a book by two Israeli journalists who obtained the records, cited experts who found evidence both for and against theories that Arafat was poisoned or had AIDS. The journalists, Avi Isacharoff and Amos Harel, said infection was also a possible cause.

Their account quoted Arafat’s personal physician, Ashraf Kurdi, as saying that he knew French doctors had found evidence of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, though the medical report makes no mention of AIDS or of any tests having been performed to detect it. Specialists found it strange the records did not mention an AIDS test, given the suspicions.

Kurdi said he believed Arafat was injected with the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, to disguise the effects of poisoning, according to the account in Haaretz. Kurdi, who was not with Arafat in Paris, did not say why he believed French doctors had discovered evidence of AIDS.

In other words, Kurdi, who is being presented as “confirming” Arafat died of AIDS, is actually on record saying he believes Arafat was poisoned even though he was not anywhere near Arafat when he died. Was the video clip cut and translated in order to distort Kurdi’s words?

But what is also strange is that Kurdi claims he received a written notification by email from French doctors. Where is this email, if it exists?

“These French tests,” Swisher states, “confirm the results of Dr. Tawfik bin Shaaban who was part of the Tunisian team treating Arafat in Ramallah.”

“It is my speciality… HIV, It is my speciality,” bin Shaaban tells Aljazeera, “There is absolutely no way he had HIV.”

The lab results showing Arafat’s negative HIV test were published by Aljazeera. As Aljazeera explained, the French doctors used pseudonyms Frederic Martipon and Etienne Louvet in order to maintain secrecy regarding Arafat’s condition.

Zionists continue to spread the lie

While some dismiss the evidence presented by Aljazeera as mere conspiracy theory, some Zionist propagandists continue to spread lies about Arafat based on no evidence at all.

Ronny Naftaniel, for example, head of the Dutch Zionist organization CIDI, tweeted “it is said that there’s a Romanian video showing Arafat having sex with his bodyguards. So cause of death was indeed Aids?” (Thanks to @Mariamkea for translation).

Naftaniel was citing an article in Ynet by Ronen Bergman that recycles and embellishes the noncredible claims from the Romanian memoir. In Bergman’s version, the microphones become video cameras:

Ion Mihai Pacepa, the Romanian communist security chief who defected to the United States, claimed that his men shot a video of Arafat’s room while he was the guest of Romanian ruler Ceausescu. In the images, Arafat was supposedly documented having sex with his bodyguards. Ariel Sharon told some of his close associates that Israel secured this videotape and considered the option of posting it on the Internet in order to shame Arafat.

Pacepa’s book makes no mention of “videos” or “images” and that’s understandable given that the events supposedly took place in the early 1970s. Using homophobia to “shame” Arafat and Arabs

What’s notable here is the reference to “shame.” As Seymour Hersh (cited by Long) observed, the homophobic and orientalist-racist premise of the ‘Arafat was gay’ rumors is that Arab and Muslim men are particularly prone to sexual shaming, and that this alleged vulnerability can be used as a weapon against them, as it was used by American torturers at Abu Ghraib prison:

The notion that Arabs are particularly vulnerable to sexual humiliation became a talking point among pro-war Washington conservatives in the months before the March, 2003, invasion of Iraq. … [Patai’s] book includes a twenty-five-page chapter on Arabs and sex, depicting sex as a taboo vested with shame and repression. “The segregation of the sexes, the veiling of the women … and all the other minute rules that govern and restrict contact between men and women, have the effect of making sex a prime mental preoccupation in the Arab world,” Patai wrote. … The Patai book, an academic told me, was “the bible of the neocons on Arab behavior.” In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged—”one, that Arabs only understand force and, two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation.”

“Outing Arafat”

Why should Arafat’s sexuality be of interest to propagandists loyal to an Israeli “state” that is going to great pains to present itself as a haven of gay rights amid an ocean of intolerance and to attract gay tourists and their money to Tel Aviv?

According to former Israeli diplomat and current Israeli PR hack Lenny Ben-David, all these gay tourists are nothing more than “sexual deviants.”

The lurid stories and lies about Arafat’s sexual relationships aim to provoke homphobic reactions and marshal this homophobia to produce hostility and revulsion at Arafat, and to delegitimize him in the eyes of an Arab audience that is presumed to always be disgusted by such behavior.

These Israeli reactions belie Israel’s “pink” marketing and expose the homphobia that exists at the heart of so much of its propaganda.

For me, there was no surprise. From the very first day, I was convinced that Yasser Arafat had been poisoned by Ariel Sharon. I even wrote about it several times.

It was a simple logical conclusion.

First, a thorough medical examination in the French military hospital where he died did not find any cause for his sudden collapse and death. No traces of any life-threatening disease were found.

The rumors distributed by the Israeli propaganda machine that Arafat had AIDS were blatant lies. They were a continuation of the rumors spread by the same machine that he was gay – all part of the relentless demonization of the Palestinian leader, which went on daily for decades. When there is no obvious cause of death, there must be a less obvious one.

Second, we know by now that several secret services possess poisons that leave no routinely detectable trace. These include the CIA, the Russian FSB (successor of the KGB), and the Mossad.

Third, opportunities were plentiful. Arafat’s security arrangements were decidedly lax. He would embrace perfect strangers who presented themselves as sympathizers of the Palestinian cause and often seated them next to himself at meals.

Fourth, there were plenty of people who aimed at killing him and had the means to do so. The most obvious one was our prime minister, Ariel Sharon. He had even talked about Arafat having "no insurance policy" in 2004.

WHAT WAS previously a logical probability has now become a certainty.

An examination of his belongings commissioned by Aljazeera TV and conducted by a highly respected Swiss scientific institute has confirmed that Arafat was poisoned with Polonium, a deadly radioactive substance that avoids detection unless one specifically looks for it.

Two years after Arafat’s death, the Russian dissident and former KGB/FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London by Russian agents using this poison. The cause was discovered by his doctors by accident. It took him three weeks to die.

Closer to home, in Amman, Hamas leader Khaled Mash’al was almost killed in 1997 by the Mossad, on orders of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The means was a poison that kills within days after coming into contact with the skin. The assassination was bungled and the victim’s life was saved when the Mossad was compelled, after an ultimatum from King Hussein, to provide an antidote in time.

If Arafat’s widow, Suha, succeeds in getting his body exhumed from the mausoleum in the Mukata’a in Ramallah, where it has become a national symbol, the poison will undoubtably be found in his body.

I remonstrated with him several times. He shrugged it off. In this respect, he was a fatalist. After his life was miraculously preserved when his airplane made a crash landing in the Libyan Desert and the people around him were killed, he was convinced that Allah was protecting him.

(Though the head of a secular movement with a clear secular program, he himself was an observant Sunni Muslim, praying at the proper times and abstaining from alcohol. He did not impose his piety on his assistants.)

Once he was interviewed in my presence in Ramallah. The journalists asked him if he expected to see the creation of the Palestinian state in his lifetime. His answer: “Both I and Uri Avnery will see it in our life.” He was quite sure of this.

ARIEL SHARON’S determination to kill Arafat was well known. Already during the siege of Beirut in Lebanon War I, it was no secret that agents were combing West Beirut for his whereabouts. To Sharon’s great frustration, they did not find him.

Even after Oslo, when Arafat came back to Palestine, Sharon did not let up. When he became Prime Minister, my fear for Arafat’s life became acute. When our army attacked Ramallah during “Operation Defensive Shield” they broke into Arafat’s compound (Mukata’a is Arabic for compound) and came within 10 meters of his rooms. I saw them with my own eyes.

Twice during the siege of many months my friends and I went to stay at the Mukata’a for several days to serve as a human shield. When Sharon was asked why he did not kill Arafat, he answered that the presence of Israelis there made it impossible.

However, I believe that this was only a pretext. It was the US that forbade it. The Americans feared, quite rightly, that an open assassination would cause the whole Arab and Muslim world to explode in anti-American fury. I cannot prove it, but I am sure that Sharon was told by Washington: “On no condition are you allowed to kill him in a way that can be traced to you. If you can do it without leaving a trace, go ahead.”

(Just as the US Secretary of State told Sharon in 1982 that on no condition was he allowed to attack Lebanon, unless there was a clear and internationally recognized provocation. Which was promptly provided.)

In an eerie coincidence, Sharon himself was felled by a stroke soon after Arafat's death, and has lived in a coma ever since.)

THE DAY Aljazeera’s conclusions were published this week happened to be the 30th anniversary of my first meeting with Arafat, which for him was the first meeting with an Israeli.

It was at the height of the battle of Beirut. To get to him, I had to cross the lines of four belligerents – the Israeli army, the Christian Lebanese Phalange militia, the Lebanese army and the PLO forces.

I spoke with Arafat for two hours. There, in the middle of a war, when he could expect to find his death at any moment, we talked about Israeli-Palestinian peace, and even a federation of Israel and Palestine, perhaps to be joined by Jordan.

The meeting, which was announced by Arafat’s office, caused a worldwide sensation. My account of the conversation was published in several leading newspapers. On my way home, I heard on the radio that four cabinet ministers were demanding that I be put on trial for treason.

The government of Menachem Begin instructed the Attorney General to open a criminal investigation. However, after several weeks, the AG determined that I had not broken any law. (The law was duly changed soon afterwards.)

IN THE many meetings I held with Arafat since then, I became totally convinced that he was an effective and trustworthy partner for peace.

I slowly began to understand how this father of the modern Palestinian liberation movement, considered an arch-terrorist by Israel and the US, became the leader of the Palestinian peace effort. Few people in history have been privileged to lead two successive revolutions in their lifetime.

When Arafat started his work, Palestine had disappeared from the map and from world consciousness. By using the “armed struggle” (alias “terrorism”)’ he succeeded in putting Palestine back on the world’s agenda.

His change of orientation occurred right after the 1973 war. That war, it will be remembered, started with stunning Arab successes and ended with a rout of the Egyptian and Syrian armies. Arafat, an engineer by profession, drew the logical conclusion: if the Arabs could not win an armed confrontation even in such ideal circumstances, other means had to be found

His decision to start peace negotiations with Israel went totally against the grain of the Palestinian National Movement, which considered Israel as a foreign invader. It took Arafat a full 15 years to convince his own people to accept his line, using all his wiles, tactical deftness and powers of persuasion. In the 1988 meeting of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile, the National Council, his concept was adopted: a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel in part of the country. This state, with its capital in East Jerusalem and its borders based on the Green Line has been, since then, the fixed and unchangeable goal; the legacy of Arafat to his successors.

Not by accident, my contacts with Arafat, first indirectly through his assistants and then directly, started at the same time: 1974. I helped him to establish contact with the Israeli leadership, and especially with Yitzhak Rabin. This led to the 1993 Oslo agreement – which was killed by the assassination of Rabin.

When asked if he had an Israeli friend, Arafat named me. This was based on his belief that I had risked my life when I went to see him in Beirut. On my part, I was grateful for his trust in me when he met me there, at a time when hundreds of Sharon’s agents were looking for him.

But beyond personal considerations, Arafat was the man who was able to make peace with Israel, willing to do so, and – more important - to get his people, including the Islamists, to accept it. This would have put an end to the settlement enterprise.

Thanks to the thorough and highly professional investigation by al-Jazzera network, which lasted several months, it is now established what killed the late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. According to the meticulously-researched documentary, Arafat was poisoned to death, using the deadly chemical agent, known as polonium-210.

When taken into the body via inhalation or ingestion, the radio active substance can enter the blood stream, releasing alpha particles that can impact organs and vital tissue directly.

The polonium-210 dose that will kill 50% of persons who internalize it is about 100,000th of a milligram, one-million times more toxic than cyanide.

It is widely believed that only three countries possess the highly deadly substance, including the United States, Russia and Israel.

Israel, whose leaders never hid their desire to murder Arafat, has denied involvement in the murder.

Israeli officials struggled to distance the Jewish state from the murder, resorting to red-herring arguments and raising doubts about the credibility of the latest findings, reached by the one of the most advanced medical labs in the world.

However, Israel lies as often as it breathes, and its denials should hold no weight whatsoever for all those seeking the truth surrounding Arafat's death.

In the final analysis, Israel murdered thousands and denied any responsibility for the murder. Thanks to the diabolical nature of Zionism, along with the extremely advanced methods of death in the possession of the Jewish state, Israel has produced some of the most professional murderers and assassins in the history of human beings.

Needless to say, some of these methods are extremely sophisticated and leave no traces as to the causes of death. The botched attempt to assassinate Khaled Misha'al, the head of Hamas' politburo in Amman in 1997 is just one example of many of Israel's criminality and nefarious behaviors.

Most Palestinians, of course, have no doubt that Israel is the ultimate murderer of the late Palestinian leader. Nothing under the sun would exonerate the criminal Zionist regime of this crime.

None the less, it is not enough to know what killed Arafat, we need to know who killed Abu Ammar. We want to know how the Mossad was able to reach the late Palestinian leader. And in order to find satisfactory answers, we need to ask all sorts of questions, some which might be embarrassing to some Palestinian leaders.

We need to know all the people who were involved in delivering medicine and food to the elected president. We need to know the smallest details about those who liaised with the Israelis in matters pertaining to Arafat. We also need to know every possible person who came into contact with Arafat in the last month of his life.

A credible commission of enquiry would have to grill everyone in the high echelon of the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah, especially those who frequented his office, those who delivered food and medicine to him as well as those who took care for his clothes and laundry.

Yes, there is no guarantee that the ultimate villain or villains will be apprehended. But this doesn't mean that we should give up and let the matter go into oblivion.

This is why the Palestinian Authority (PA), the Arab League and the Islamic Cooperation Organization should insist that the United Nations Security Council appoint a credible commission of enquiry with wide-ranging powers, including interrogating suspects, regardless of their nationalities and positions.

This is what the UN Security Council did to investigate the murder of the former Lebanese Minister Rafik Hareeri several years ago, and there is no reason why a similar investigation and similar commission of inquiry can't be ordered to look into this equally abhorrent murder.

Yasser Arafat may not have been the most saintly person under the sun. However, letting the matter of his death go into oblivion or vanish into uncertainty, would only perpetuate the unethical world order where one life is sacred whereas another is expendable and has no sanctity.

Once again, like most Palestinians and other honest people around the world, this writer has no doubts whatsoever as to Israel's responsibility for the murder of Arafat.

Ascertaining this conviction scientifically and objectively may not really reveal dramatic facts.

Moreover, it probably wouldn't lead to the prosecution and punishment of the killer or killers, especially Israeli Jewish killers.

After all, Israel is too immune and too rebellious an entity to allow justice to be done. After all, Israel itself is a crime against humanity whose very existence is a serious affront to human morality and decency.

But exposing Israeli criminality wouldn't be a bad thing. We are supposed to be living in a moral universe, where right is right and wrong is wrong.

Hence, we must not allow a deviant, nefarious and unethical entity to corrupt our world as the exuding evil could put the very survival of humanity at stake.

Dr. Dror Sadeh: One of earliest victims of Israeli polonium poisoning, died of cancer at age 60 after major 1957 radiation leak

With news breaking in Al Jazeera this week about the possible poisoning of Yasser Arafat by polonium, I thought it worthwhile to examine an interesting line in Clayton Swisher’s report, which refers to an accident in an Israeli lab involving the material. Through further research, I discovered that this was the first nuclear accident in Israeli history and it took the lives of a number of Israeli researchers, both immediately after the accident and even decades later.

This report by Haaretz’s Akiva Eldar is based on Michael Karpin’s book, The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What That Means for the World:

According to the book, in 1957 a leak was discovered at a Weizmann Institute laboratory operated by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Traces of polonium 210 were found on the hands of Prof. Dror Sadeh, a physicist who researched radioactive materials, as well as on various objects in the professor’s home. The AEC handled the accident with deep secrecy. After a short investigation, whose results were not presented to even the workers, the lab was hermetically sealed for several months.

A month after the lab closed, a physics student died of leukemia. A few years later, Prof. Yehuda Wolfson, Sadeh’s direct supervisor, also died, and Prof. Amos de Shalit, the department’s director, died of cancer in 1969 at age 43.

When the leak was discovered, Sadeh was terribly anxious, but tests indicated he was well. But according to Karpin’s book, the tests did not include his bone marrow. Sadeh and his wife hid the facts from their family and friends until he died prematurely. The cause of death was cancer.

The Israeli authorities did not admit that the leak and the deaths were connected, but people close to Sadeh confirmed that the state took responsibility for the accident and compensated his family.

This obituary indicates Sadeh, who later became a renowned astrophysicist, proved a fundamental principle of Einstein’s theory of relativity, and was the director of the Israeli space agency, died at age 60 in 1993.

Here is another source offering more information on the cause of the leak, and the scientists contaminated, including the graduate student who died:

The first nuclear accident in Israel took place before the reactor was operational. In the years 1956-1957 scientists in the Weizmann Institute were preparing for the construction of the reactor and the production of a bomb. “Material which was supposed to seal the nuclear substance and protect it from leaking cracked and radioactive materials leaked. This was discovered late, and high reading of nuclear material was found in the laboratory and in the bodies of some of the workers. High radiation was also found in the homes of the young scientists, articles they touched and even their children’s beds. This was reported by Maariv in 2006 after a period of censorship in these matters for nearly 50 years (a report by Chen Kotz-Bar).

…Dror Sade himself wrote: “During 1956-1957 I was working in the radioactive laboratory in the Weizmann Institute. I was an employee of the Israeli Nuclear Energy Committee. As part of my work I treated a radioactive source which emitted alpha rays. This source was coated with a very thin layer of plastic material designed so that all the radiation would be directed towards the target. For a long period of time there was no monitoring of the radiation in the institute. Then one day a test was conducted on a table at the lab, and Alpha radiation well exceeding normal level was detected. Even in my home radiation was detected. The lab was sealed for some months. In my urine tests no radiation was found, but no attempt to test other organs (e.g. bone marrow) was made. One month after the lab was closed one of the physics students died from blood cancer. As far as I can remember his name was Yonathan Ramberg.

Asia Ramberg, widow of Yonathan Ramberg (the student who died of leukemia) recalled: “I remember that someone from the institute came and said that he had to go as soon as possible to the hospital.” Bamberg was a graduate student at the Weizmann Institute at the time and was the youngest faculty member in Dror Sadeh’s group.

“Yonathan was 28 at the time. He was feeling quite ill and large spots started to appear on his body. I was not even scared; I just saw the bright side of things. We went to the hospital Friday and on Saturday they told me that he was very ill. The day after that, Sunday, was our second anniversary. I picked a few flowers, and when I got to the hospital I saw Yonathan dwindle in front of my eyes. He died the same day. I was in shock. My parents collected me from the hospital like a broken egg-shell. I was helpless. I barely spoke for three years. I did not investigate what happened. Nothing.”

It makes perfect sense that Israeli intelligence, learning about both the accident and its repercussions for the health of the lab workers, would be interested in learning everything it could about polonium poisoning. When you have a lemon, you make lemonade, right? Clearly, Russia had a similar program because its polonium was used, likely by its intelligence agents, to poison Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

Israel operates a major facility at Ness Ziona which experiments with chemical and biological agents. It would make sense if research was performed on polonium, it would’ve happened here.

Now that the PA has agreed to exhume Arafat’s body in Ramallah, further testing has at least a 50% chance of determining whether polonium killed him. Testing of his body tissues could also isolate the nuclear facility from which the polonium was produced. If Israel killed him, it would’ve been far smarter to have procured Russian polonium than to have used material from Israel’s Dimona reactor. But if the material is from Dimona, the killers would then be exposed.

Though we can’t know for sure whether Israel did it, we can see who is creeping out of the mire to debunk Al Jazeera. Josh Block and Lenny Ben David, both paid pro-Israel operatives (one formerly with Aipac and the second, the Israeli embassy) are circulating discredited claims that Arafat was a “sexual deviant” (Elie Leshem in The Times of Israel even called him a “pederast”) who engaged in gay sex with his bodyguards and died of AIDS. The AIDS claims was convincingly debunked within the Al Jazeera documentary by a specialist who tested him (as did the French hospital where he died) and found him HIV negative. The gay sex smear was peddled in a book by the Romanian ex-secret police chief under Ceausescu, who defected to the west. ‘Nuf said.

The Jerusalem Post quotes an “expert” falsely claiming that polonium deteriorates so quickly that no traces of it could remain after eight years. This expert has no scientific training, and in fact has a PhD in political science and is a colonel in the IDF. Hussein Ibish, DC neocons’ favorite Arab, writes in Foreign Policy that the Al Jazeera story is bogus because the symptoms Arafat presented at death were inconsistent with polonium poisoning. Ibish offers no scientific support for his claims. In fact, at least one symptom Arafat exhibited, severe diarrhea, is consistent with such poisoning. Though it is true that Litvinenko lost his hair and Arafat did not.

The fact that such figures have come out of the woodwork to protect Israel from culpability for Arafat’s death indicates there are those within Israel’s intelligence apparatus who want to obfuscate and confuse rather than shed light on these issues.

The pan-Arab satellite channel Al Mayadeen on Friday broadcast a tape of a Palestinian allegedly confessing to poisoning the late President Yasser Arafat's food on behalf of Israeli intelligence.

The video was allegedly recorded in Israel's Negev prison in 2006 and shows a Palestinian prisoner suspected of being planted in the jail as a spy for Israel. He is said to have been interrogated by another detainee.

The unnamed prisoner tells his "interrogator" that he put poison in Arafat's food in the kitchen of the Muqata, the presidential compound in Ramallah, with the help of a cook.

The prisoner says he was recruited by Israel's intelligence service in 2002. Another collaborator had taken him to Jerusalem for work, and introduced him to a man named Yoram who recruited him as a collaborator.

He was given a military uniform and trained with Israeli soldiers for two months, he says. Then he was taken to Jerusalem where Israeli officers showed him and several other collaborators a video about the Muqata, including Arafat's room and the kitchen.

He says the group of collaborators was ordered to poison Arafat and received payment in June or July 2004. They were given poison and told they would be killed if they did not carry out the poisoning, he says.

The man then explains how he and other collaborators accessed the Muqata with the cooperation of one of the compound's guards.

According to his account, the cooks were wearing kitchen uniforms and Arafat's food was ready, but the first cook refused to add the poison. Another agreed and put it in Arafat's rice and soup.

The Palestinian Authority agreed on Wednesday to exhume Arafat's body after new allegations that he was poisoned with the radioactive element polonium-210 in 2004.

A Swiss institute that examined clothing provided by Arafat's widow Suha as part of an Al Jazeera expose said it found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210, though symptoms described in the president's medical reports were not consistent with the radioactive agent.

Arafat was confined to the Muqata by Israel for three years after the second intifada erupted.

He collapsed in October 2004, and foreign doctors flocked to his bedside from Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan amid public assurances from Arafat's aides over the next two weeks that he was suffering from no more than the flu.

But looking weak and thin, he was airlifted to a military hospital in France, where he slipped into a coma and died on Nov. 11, 2004.

French doctors who treated Arafat in his final days said they could not establish the cause of death. French officials, citing privacy laws, refused to give details of the nature of his illness.

Israeli Army Radio said Wednesday that introducing polonium into food was the only way to kill someone with the poison and asked Avi Dichter, who headed Israel's spy agency at the time, whether it would have been possible with Arafat.

"You're asking me as his cook?" he answered, laughing.

He continued: "No, we were focused on more serious things. Arafat's food did not interest us. I think it interested those around him, in order, really, to keep his health up, as he was indeed known to be unwell. But the Shin Bet, or the State of Israel, were not involved in Yasser Arafat's food."

Hassan Khreisheh, the Deputy Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Committee (PLC) and the member in the committee investigating former Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's death, stated that some PA leaders were involved in Arafat's death caused by radioactive polonium.

Khreisheh told the Saudi "al-Shark" newspaper that some Palestinian, Arab and international bodies hampered the work of all the committees set up to investigate the causes behind Arafat's death during the previous period in order to prevent them from finding those responsible for the assassination.

He pointed out that those bodies prevented Arafat's doctor from appearing before the investigation committees, as they prevented the two Egyptian and Tunisian medical teams from giving their testimony to the committees, in an attempt to protect figures who had been close to the former leader and who were involved in his assassination, Khreisheh said.

Concerning the PA's consent to exhuming Arafat's body for an autopsy, the Deputy Speaker of PLC said that it was the result of the tremendous pressure exerted on the official and public level to open the file that has been concealed since nearly eight years.

He noted that the sudden opening of the file of Arafat's death resulted in a state of confusion amongst the hidden parties that participated in killing the former Palestinian President and prevented opening an investigation into the incident.

He also called on the Palestinian factions to form a Higher National Committee to oversee the autopsy of Arafat's body to make sure of the presence of polonium in his body, and pursue those responsible for it.

It is noteworthy that the issue of poisoning Arafat has been stoked again after Al-Jazeera TV investigation which was based on scientific evidence revealed the presence of toxic radioactive polonium in the former President's personal belongings that he used in his final days before his death.

The results of Al-Jazeera's investigation demonstrated broad dissatisfaction in the Palestinian arena because of what Palestinians saw as negligence on the part of the PA and Fatah movement in investigating the death of leader Arafat.